Jeremy Skidmore directs Mary's Wedding with a sensitive, assured touch. The 90-minute play, told in fractured flashbacks, unfolds the story of British-born Mary (Kathleen Coons) and farm boy Charlie (Aubrey Deeker), two teenage lovers in rural Canada separated by the Great War.

Charlie tells us at the outset that what we see is not quite what really happened, but rather Mary's dreamed version of events. And he's good for his word: for instance, during a pre-war early meeting between the two youths, Mary opens a letter that Charlie has sent from the front in Belgium. "What did I say?" Charlie asks.

The muddy panic of trench fighting is evoked; Mary captures it in the phrase "all those arms and voices."

Charlie is a horseman, an enlistee in the cavalry doomed to slaughter by armor and automatic weapons. But back at home, before, he takes Mary for her first ride, and not since Equus have the erotic resonances of travel by horseback been so thoroughly explored.

Dan Covey's lighting design, which carries us from a barn just before a rain to a firefight on the Western Front, is everything it should be.

The lyrical, rhythmic, allusive Mary's Wedding is the first produced full-length play from Stephen Massicotte, who is based in Calgary. Let's hope to hear more from him.

posted: 5:52:14 PM